This invention relates to portable computer systems. Specifically, this invention relates to portable computer systems having integrated circuits for receiving and processing paging messages.
Over the past several years, personal communication devices such as pagers and cellular telephones have become widely used in both business and personal environments. Fast and reliable communication has made it much easier for people to travel from their home or office without becoming unavailable to co-workers or others. The advent of portable computers has also encouraged this trend, as many people perform a large amount of their duties using computing devices, and the portable or xe2x80x9claptopxe2x80x9d computer further enhances the ability of people to remain productive while traveling.
More recently, pagers have been introduced into the market with increased data handling capabilities. As one example, the PageWriter(trademark) 2000 manufactured by Motorola is a two-way pager with a keyboard and graphical display which sends Internet e-mail and has automated message handling capability. In addition, computing devices have been enhanced with additional communication capabilities. U.S. Pat. No. 5,550,861 to Chan et al. for example, describes a PCMCIA format card for laptop computing applications which includes an onboard modem and pager unit.
Despite these trends in combining communication and data processing capabilities, little progress has been made in taking advantage of the available benefits of the combined implementation of such devices. The current state of the art consists essentially of conventional communication functions coupled to conventional data processing functions, thereby producing one device which may combine previously available features but which does nothing to provide additional functionality. In addition, advantageous hardware implementations of such combinations have not been explored.
The invention comprises a portable computer which includes a wireless receiver. The wireless receiver may be adapted for receiving pages. In some embodiments, the portable computer includes a page interpreter coupled to the page receiver so as to translate selected page messages into commands to be executed by the portable computer.
Another embodiment of the invention comprises a computing device which includes a microprocessor, a microcontroller coupled to the microprocessor; and a wireless receiver coupled to the microcontroller. The computing device may further include a battery, coupled to the microcontroller and the wireless receiver such that the microcontroller and the wireless receiver are operative to receive and store messages when the microprocessor is in an off state.
Messages received via a page receiving circuit may in some embodiments of the invention be classified into two groups. A volatile memory circuit may store messages of a first group, and a non-volatile memory may store information concerning message content for messages of a second group. Messages of the second group may comprise commands to the portable computer.